A yearlong sting operation, including aliases, a 5 a.m. surprise inspection and surreptitious purchases from an Amish farm in Pennsylvania, culminated in the federal government announcing this week that it has gone to court to stop Rainbow Acres Farm from selling its contraband to willing customers in the Washington area.

The product in question: unpasteurized milk.

Activists are claiming that dozens of politically linked Facebook accounts have been removed or suspended by the company in the last 12 hours.

The list of suspended pages include those for the anti cuts group UK Uncut, and pages that were created by students during last December’s university occupations.

A list posted on the UCL occupation blog site says the Goldsmiths Fights Back, Slade Occupation, Open Brikbeck, and Tower Hamlet Greens pages as no longer functioning.

It is not yet known how many websites have been affected in total or why they are not working. Facebook is currently looking into the issue.

Guy Aitchison, 26, an administrator for one of the non-functioning pages said, “I woke up this morning to find that a lot of the groups we’d been using for anti-cuts activity had disappeared. The timing of it seems suspicious given a general political crackdown because of the royal wedding.”

Toshiso Kosako, a professor at the prestigious University of Tokyo, said at a news conference that the prime minister’s office and agencies within the government “have ignored the laws and have only dealt with the problem at the moment.” Holding back tears, he said this approach would only prolong the crisis.

Internet exposes scene of anti-prostitution where naked whoremonger scales building to escape

Recently, an internet post has been circulating on various major discussion forums, the poster having used a camera to capture a comical site during a Changchun anti-prostitution surprise inspection/raid. The poster said: April 26th, didn’t have class in the afternoon so I went to hang out with a friend, heard some noise outside the window, and at this time saw people running on the roof of the building across from us. Thinking that something was about to happen, I picked up my camera to observe and it was at this moment that the following scene happened. Only later did I find out that it was an anti-prostitution raid.

✦ Rise of the Black Serial Killer

Most people are familiar with how the story goes. Intelligent middle class white loner, abused as a youth, a bed-wetter until puberty with a morbid fascination of torturing animals as a teen, snaps and begins killing people as an adult. The names and stories of Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Robert Lee Yates and dozens of others fit this description and seem make this idea credible. Turn on the television or read a fiction book about serial killers and this is the idea portrayed, in nearly every instance, serial killers are always white. But is this always correct? The answer is resoundingly, no!

A group of at least 200 men beat her, pinched her and tore at her clothes in a 40-minute attack which only ended when a group of women came to her aid.

Nationwide, about 22% of sanitary sewer overflows are caused by accumulations of a hard, gucky, adhesive substance called FOG, short for “fats, oils and grease.” But until now, no one knew exactly what it was or how it formed. A team of environmental engineers at North Carolina State University in Raleigh have been working since 2004 to unravel the mystery. What they’ve found comes as a surprise: The grayish-white, gritty formations that look like stalagmites along the walls of big sewer pipes are actually soap. “But this isn’t Ivory,” says Joel Ducoste, a professor of environmental science at the university. “We’re creating soap in the sewers but it’s not something you’d want to wash your face with.”

It would be one of the largest Facebook share transactions to date and show concern that the social networking site’s growth cannot keep pace with its market valuation.

✦ Tuscaloosa Tornado Damage Aerial Footage [Video]

A 21-year-old man who plunged in his car 200 feet over the South Rim of the Grand Canyon has walked away with minor injuries.

A spokesperson for Grand Canyon National Park said the man’s vehicle landed in a tree 200 feet below Twin Overlooks on Desert View Drive.

The incident occurred Monday around 7:45 p.m. when the man said he accidentally drove his vehicle over the rim. When the vehicle came to rest, he said he crawled out, climbed back up to the rim and flagged a passing motorist, who called park rangers.

The U.S. economy is dying and we are heading for the next Great Depression. The talking heads in the mainstream media love to spin the economic numbers around and around and they love to make it sound like the economy is improving, but the truth is that it doesn’t take a genius to see what is happening to the U.S. economic system. All over the nation many of our greatest cities are being slowly but surely transformed into post-apocalyptic wastelands. All over the mid-Atlantic, all along the Gulf coast, all throughout the “rust belt” and all over the entire state of California cities that once had incredibly vibrant economies are being turned into rotting, post-industrial hellholes.

It is being done purposely and it is being done by design. Many Americans like to think of themselves as “well off”, but as will be demonstrated below, we don’t “own” nearly as much as we think that we do. The truth is that most of us have to frantically run around accumulating wealth as rapidly as we can so that we can somehow stay ahead of the rate that wealth is being taken away from us. The entire system is designed to take what you have away from you. There are many ways that this is accomplished – taxation, inflation, debt, interest, fines, fees, tickets, government seizures and good old-fashioned corporate greed. If you tried to just sit back and do nothing but hold on to the wealth that you already have you would find out that it would disappear rather quickly. When you take the time to really analyze our system the conclusion is undeniable – everything that you think that you own is being systematically taken away from you.

✦ Facebook Facial Recognition Could Get Creepy

“Awesome! Now I can take pictures of cute girls at the grocery store or at the park, upload them and Facebook will tell me who they are! (I’m pretty sure that’s not [how] it works but I’m sure it will get there.)”

The commenter’s confidence says a lot: Facial recognition may be just one more way for Facebook to push the visual part of the social graph (photos of us) toward being more public and far less private. Facebook has a history of asking for forgiveness after the fact instead of asking for permission in advance, and its new face-recognition feature could become the latest example of a seemingly innocuous development morphing into a serious threat to the privacy of our (visual) data. And as usual, some Facebook users will like the convenience of the new features so much that they will forget the privacy trade-off altogether, or just choose not to worry about it.

► The 91-Year-Old Woman Selling $60 Suicide Kits

Each of the kits Hydorn assembles by hand is a simple contraption designed for a single purpose: people kill themselves with it by encasing their head in a bag of helium, which is lethal in pure form. People like Klonoski, the son of a U.S. district judge and whose funeral was attended by more than a thousand people. The Gladd Group’s estimated annual sales are $98,000. That means Sharlotte Hydorn sells more than 1,600 suicide kits every year.

While the Obama Administration has commenced a third war in Libya and is spending billions every week in military operations from Kabul to Tripoli, it is shutting down various domestic programs for lack of funds. The latest is the Allen Telescope Array — a large number of small satellite dishes that search for extraterrestrial life in Northern California. The prohibitive cost? $1.5 million dollars a year (an additional $1 million is used on data collection and analysis). In the meantime, the Administration is refusing to yield to the latest Afghan official insisting that the country does not want or need U.S. troops and yet another case of an Afghan soldier killing U.S. personnel — this time eight U.S. soldiers and one contractor killed by one of our allies.

It is a known fact that while African Americans and white Americans use marijuana at the same statistical rate, African Americans are arrested for marijuana use at a much higher rate. Despite the fact that New York City is 60% white, white people only amount to 10% of all NYC marijuana arrests.

Think current U.S. political campaigns are nasty? The attack-pinback has long been a tool of partisans and politicos.

For years, scientists have speculated that armadillos can pass on leprosy to humans, and that they are behind the few dozen cases of the disease that occur in the U.S. every year. Now, they have evidence. A genetic study published today in The New England Journal of Medicine shows that U.S. armadillos and human patients share what seems to be a unique strain of the bacterium that causes leprosy.

He’s just so sick of being pigeon-holed as an instrument of U.S. policy. And “truth, justice, and the American way“ are ”not enough anymore.” That’s why Superman, in the latest Action Comic, has announced he is “renouncing” his U.S. citizenship.

Although he’s traditionally seen as an American hero (remember, though, he is an alien), Superman is fed up with being connected to the USA. According to the Comics Alliance blog (and reported by BoingBoing), in Action Comics #900 Superman tells the president‘s national security adviser that he’s had enough of the Red, White, and Blue

Camden, New Jersey, with a population of 70,390, is per capita the poorest city in the nation. It is also the most dangerous. The city’s real unemployment — hard to estimate, since many residents have been severed from the formal economy for generations — is probably 30 to 40 percent. The median household income is $24,600. There is a 70 percent high school dropout rate, with only 13 percent of students managing to pass the state’s proficiency exams in math. The city is planning $28 million in draconian budget cuts, with officials talking about cutting 25 percent from every department, including layoffs of nearly half the police force. The proposed slashing of the public library budget by almost two-thirds has left the viability of the library system in doubt.

In the 1990s, a researcher named Kris Pister dreamed up a wild future in which people would sprinkle the Earth with countless tiny sensors, no larger than grains of rice.

These “smart dust” particles, as he called them, would monitor everything, acting like electronic nerve endings for the planet. Fitted with computing power, sensing equipment, wireless radios and long battery life, the smart dust would make observations and relay mountains of real-time data about people, cities and the natural environment. Advertisement

Now, a version of Pister’s smart dust fantasy is starting to become reality.

On Tuesday, the Air Force issued a call for help making a miniature drone that could covertly drop a mysterious and unspecified tracking “dust” onto people, allowing them to be tracked from a distance. The proposal says its useful for all kinds of random things, from identifying friendly forces and civilians to tracking wildlife. But the motive behind a covert drone tagger likely has less to do with sneaking up on spotted owls and more to do with painting a target on the backs of tomorrow’s terrorists.

The court was told Emmanuel McPherson, 48, objected when his flatmate, James Albert Madden, played a Limp Bizkit album on Mr McPherson’s stereo.

A fight then broke out, in which Mr Madden allegedly beat Mr McPherson to death.

Navigation device maker TomTom has apologized for supplying driving data collected from customers to police to use in catching speeding motorists.

The data, including historical speed, has been sold to local and regional governments in the Netherlands to help police set speed traps, Dutch newspaper AD reported here, with a Google translation here. As more smartphones offer GPS navigation service, TomTom has been forced to compensate for declining profit by increasing sales in other areas, including the selling of traffic data.

Pretty surreal footage right now coming out of Birmingham, AL, right now of what is believed to be a 1-mile wide F4 or F5 tornado

In a museum filled with preserved abnormal fetuses, giant and dwarf skeletons, and an 8-foot colon, what makes a cabinet full of safety pins, small trinkets and other random items one of the most fascinating exhibits?

For starters, each one of these objects — and there are thousands — was swallowed and extracted. The curious can get a closer look at the carefully catalogued items at the Mütter Museum of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

The collection was assembled and donated to the museum by Chevalier Jackson, a pioneering laryngologist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

► Police dress up as doctors to test citizens

Turkish police donned white coats and stethoscopes to disguise themselves as doctors, then knocked on people’s doors to see how easily they would fall for a confidence scam.

The undercover police officers told residents of the southeastern city of Gaziantep they were screening for high blood pressure and handed out pills, according to Turkish media.

They were alarmed when residents at 86 out of 100 households visited on Tuesday swallowed the pills immediately.

Police later returned to warn residents to be more cautious.

The police pills were harmless placebos. But a local gang had been using the same technique to give people heavy sedatives and then burgle them.

It goes on: “We invite authors to use the words ‘free-living’, ‘free-ranging’ or ‘free-roaming’ rather than ‘wild animals’

“There is an obvious prejudgment here that should be avoided.”

► JON FOY’S RESURRECT DEAD

For the last six years, Jon Foy has been filming a movie about the mysterious Toynbee tiles. His documentary, Resurrect Dead, follows the investigation carried out by Justin Duerr, Steve Weinik, and Colin Smith as they set out to discover what the tiles mean and who made them. On their search, the three detectives uncovered increasingly bizarre clues: a decades old newspaper article, a David Mamet play, a Jupiter colonization organization, and a Toynbee message that “hijacked” local news broadcasts. In the end, Foy comes closer then anyone else to solving this four-decades-old mystery.

This is a strange, Twitter-borne tale of flirting, cutouts, and lack of online caution in the intelligence and defense worlds. Professionals who should’ve known better casually disclosed their personal details (a big no-no in spook circles) and lobbed allegations they later couldn’t or wouldn’t support (a big no-no in all circles). It led to a Pentagon investigation. And it starts with a Twitter account that no longer exists called @PrimorisEra.

It’s one of the biggest data breaches in history. Now that Sony has come clean — sort of — on a computer intrusion this month that exposed personal information on 77 million PlayStation Network users, one obvious question remains: Who pulled off the hack?

“Well, this is just really cool,” he said sarcastically. “A graffiti pack. Just wonderful for all of our nice friends to carry around and then in a moment or two just shoot everybody’s walls and property up.”

South Salt Lake police spokesman Garry Keller says graffiti is more of a plague than a problem.

“Some people refer to it as street art,” he said. “It’s not street art. It’s graffiti. You’re damaging somebody else’s property. It takes up their resources, their time, their money to remove it. And it’s all for nothing.”

John MacDougall, then 25, was the lonely pamphleteer of lore, only instead of paper and ink he was armed with a 30-foot transmission dish, an electronic keyboard, and a burning objection to HBO’s decision in 1986 to begin scrambling its satellite signal and charging viewers $12.95 a month.

That move and price had offended MacDougall’s sense of fair play – and all but halted the sales being generated by his fledgling satellite dish business in Ocala, Fla. So at 12:32 a.m. on Sunday, April 27, he transformed himself into Captain Midnight by commandeering HBO’s satellite transmission signal – interrupting a showing of The Falcon and the Snowman – and putting in its place the above protest message that aired for four-and-a-half minutes.

On 17 March this year, the federal department of justice (DoJ) decided that enough was enough and it has made moves to have the New Orleans police department (NOPD) placed under the supervision of a federal judge. The New Orleans jail system will likely follow.

The department released a report covering only the past two years and ignoring several current federal investigations of police officers for murder. It says, more or less, that the NOPD is incapable on any level; that it is racist; that it systemically violates civil rights, routinely using “unnecessary and unreasonable force”; that it is “largely indifferent to widespread violations of law and policy by its police officers” and appears to have gone to great lengths to cover up its shootings of civilians. “NOPD’s mishandling of officer-involved shooting investigations,” the report says, “was so blatant and egregious that it appeared intentional in some respects.”

He said another victim had tried to clean herself with bleach after being attacked.

One of his patients had given herself an injection of chlorine in the belief that this would stop herself becoming pregnant.

ARE the con men, the shills and the short-change artists of the old time circus and carnival deserting the field for the more generous one of big business? The present-day short-change artist is entirely modernized with up-to-date methods. Methods have to be up-to-date to make it possible to short-change an experienced bank teller, and that is exactly what they are doing. As a side line to thus robbing banks, odd fives and tens are daily picked up in drug stores, filling stations, etc. Usually the storekeeper first finds it out when counting up at night; the short-change artist is clever!

✮ Video: Man Caught Peeing on Cough Drops in Drug Store

Investigators say the man went to the aisle where the cough drops are kept, looked around, unzipped his pants, and urinated on about 110 packages of cough drops.

From war, art. This is the basic premise of The Graffiti of War , a project from two combat veterans that features the unconventional military art that soldiers, seamen, marines, and airmen (and women) create during deployments. From tanks spray painted with “I love u baby” to memorials for the dead to enemy jets covered in graffiti, every art work tells a story. It’s the alternative, unauthorized history of war from those who fought it.

✮ ATLAS HOODS: BOTSWANA’S COWBOY METALHEADS

Love it or hate it, when most people think of metal, they think of white dudes. Even if metal was born from the blues and there are growing scenes in places like Indonesia and Peru, metal’s founding fathers–Priest, Sabbath, Maiden–and most of those who’ve come after have been unmistakably Caucasian. Which is why I was pleasantly surprised to find out about a small but passionate collection of guys who dressed like doomsday cowboys and listened to Motorhead in the predominantly black, central African country of Botswana.

One of the 3 Harleys built by Maurice Combalbert for the clip “Harley Davidson”. The last one still existing. Brigitte Bardot. 1968.

Now showing at Los Angeles’ Geffen Contemporary museum: “the first major U.S. museum survey of graffiti and street art,” an exhibition that reverently displays “installations by 50 of the most dynamic artists from the graffiti and street art community.”

Translation: They’re having wine and cheese parties surrounded by framed images of urban blight. They’re giving the destruction of other people’s property a hallowed place in high-art halls.

Thanks Smart Crew

Awesome collection of vintage video game arcade pictures.

In recent years, there have been many speculative writings about Planet X, which is also known as Planet Nibiru. Most of these writings are based somewhat on Zecharia Sitchin’s book, The Twelfth Planet. Sitchin, like Velikovsky and Darwin, used his respective theories to support his claims. A question arises: Is Nibiru real? The answer to that is a resounding “Yes”.

There are those who believe that the Anunnaki of Nibiru are coming back to Earth soon. They believe that Planet X is going to pass by Earth, in May or June of 2003, on its 3,600 year orbit around our sun. Such believers are terrified of the consequences that a close pass by Nibiru might bring. They fear this will cause earthquakes, tidal waves, severe flooding, food shortages due to climatic conditions, diseases, meteor fire storms, volcanic eruptions and the like. They are afraid that it will result in a great catastrophic infliction of loss of life on Earth.

So here’s a few nutty points about the birth certificate sure to be seized upon by the nonbelievers

Microbiologist Arturo Casadevall of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City recalls learning several years ago that single-cell fungi had been found thriving inside the collapsed nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, Ukraine. He and his colleagues later saw reports that the cooling water in some working nuclear reactors turns black from colonies of melanin-rich fungi.

Nuclear reactors are intense sources of gamma rays, which can zap through living organisms and leave behind trails of destruction. Many microorganisms can survive in extreme environments, but Casadevall thought that something more might be going on. Perhaps the fungi were growing thanks to the radiation, not in spite of it. “The thought was that biology never wastes any energy source,” he says.

It took jurors about five minutes to reach their verdict in the February trial. Juror Patrick Reeves tells The Spokesman-Review someone would “have to be an idiot” not to realize Richardson simply forgot to pay.

The Demon Core was the nickname given to a 6.2-kilogram (14 lb) subcritical mass of plutonium that accidentally went critical in two separate accidents at the Los Alamos laboratory in 1945 and 1946. Both incidents resulted in the acute radiation poisoning and subsequent death of a scientist. After these incidents, the sphere of plutonium was referred to as the Demon Core.

The lobster with which a woman was masturbating defecates into her vagina, implanting brine shrimp eggs which later hatch inside her.

Already Passed by Congress On October 5, 1982, Dr. Brain T. Clifford of the Pentagon announced at a press conference (“The Star”, New York, Oct. 5, 1982) that contact between U.S. citizens and extra-terrestrials or their vehicles is strictly illegal. According to a law already on the books (Title 14, Section 1211 of the Code of Federal Regulations, adopted on July 16, 1969, before the Apollo moon shots), anyone guilty of such contact automatically becomes a wanted criminal to be jailed for one year and fined $5,000.

Gundersen Postulates Unit 3 Explosion May Have Been Prompt Criticality in Fuel Pool

The question raises a fundamental issue of consciousness: how much of what we perceive exists outside of us and how much is a product of our minds? Time is a dimension like any other, fixed and defined down to its tiniest increments: millennia to microseconds, aeons to quartz oscillations. Yet the data rarely matches our reality. The rapid eye movements in the mirror, known as saccades, aren’t the only things that get edited out. The jittery camera shake of everyday vision is similarly smoothed over, and our memories are often radically revised. What else are we missing? When Eagleman was a boy, his favorite joke had a turtle walking into a sheriff’s office. “I’ve just been attacked by three snails!” he shouts. “Tell me what happened,” the sheriff replies. The turtle shakes his head: “I don’t know, it all happened so fast.”

Fukushima, or rather the almost 200 tons of fuel present in the four reactors and the 2800 tons of old reactor cores in big 40 ft deep swimming pools that stand over the reactors, represent a lethal and potentially apocalyptic contaminant for the internal poisoning of the whole human race. Taken together, the active reactors and old cores are equivalent to 2000 atomic bombs of 500 kilotons each. Fukushima is then, capable of dispersing in the biosphere, five times the long lived breathable radioactive poisons, cesium 137, Strontium 90, plutonium 239, etc., than all the combined nuclear detonations to date. It is as if Fukushima were equal to a 1000 megaton Atomic Bombs; or expressed another way, 2,000 individual 500 kiloton Atomic Bombs.

✪ The Internet as a Tool for Repression

One argument he consistently makes is that while tech enthusiasts regularly highlight the benefits of new Internet innovations for activists, rarely do they consider the other side of the equation: how technology can also aid enemies of democracy and free expression. He suggests that dictators are not nearly so afraid of the Internet as we might imagine, and that in many cases they have effectively co-opted bloggers and mined social networks to promote their repressive ends. “States used to torture to get this kind of information,” he says. “Now all they have to do is go onto Facebook.”

A Connecticut mother who says she wanted to give her son a better education will be arraigned on Wednesday on charges for enrolling the 6-year-old in another town, sparking outrage and support from people nationwide.

Tanya McDowell, a 33-year-old homeless woman whose last known address was in Bridgeport, Conn, is scheduled to be arraigned on charges of larceny and conspiracy to commit larceny for allegedly stealing $15,686 from Norwalk schools. Prosecutors allege that figure is the value of her son’s education at Norwalk’s Brookside Elementary School between the time he was illegally enrolled in January and McDowell’s arrest on April 14. If convicted, she faces up to 20 years in prison.

Shopping for fake Louis Vuittons or Chanel bags on Canal street in Chinatown has become a requisite tourist activity. Only now you could go to jail for it.

City councilwoman Margaret Chin, who represents the Chinatown district, is introducing a bill this Thursday that proposes harsh punishment for shoppers caught purchasing counterfeits, the New York Post is reporting. Under Chin’s bill, that fake LV could cost you $1,000 in fines (still not quite the cost of some of the real deals) or up to a year in prison.

Sound harsh? That’s the point.

The startling claim went without controversy until today, when Good Magazine pointed out that Trump’s “plan” to seize $1.5 trillion from Iraq’s oil profits to “reemburse ourselves” for the invasion and subsequent occupation would actually be an explicit violation of international law — a violation considered to be a war crime.

“According to the 1907 Hague Convention, ‘pillaging,’ the stealing of valuable goods from a locality, especially during combat, is a war crime, regardless of what you feel you deserve,” noted Cord Jefferson, Good’s senior editor. “In the Hague’s exact words: ‘The pillage of a town or place, even when taken by assault, is prohibited.'”

‘I’ve seen just about everything that could happen in this community. I renamed this avenue here body-a-week avenue,’ he said.

‘I’ve been here since 1989. I think I’ve seen at least 15 murders on this block in that period of time. It’s a dangerous block.’

Lesson of the day… when a police officer asks you a simple question, DO NOT LIE! A simple yes from this guy would have saved him a lot of bruises from the Las Vegas police dept. My view on this: cops dodge bullets every day and deal with all kinds of liars… for the cops safety, Mr – I KNOW MY RIGHTS should be treated no differently than a street thug once he lies to an officer.

# Third plateau: At 7.5 to 15.0 mg/kg, effects include flanging of visual effects, difficulty recognizing people or objects, chaotic blindness, dreamlike vision, inability to comprehend language, abstract hallucinations, delayed reaction time, decision making impairment, feelings of peace and quiet, near complete loss of motor coordination, short-term memory impairment, and/or feelings of rebirth. # Fourth plateau: At 15.0 mg/kg or more, an individual may experience a perceived loss of contact and control with their own body, changes in visual perception, out-of-body experiences, perceptions of contact with “superior” beings, other miscellaneous delusions, lack of movement or desire to move, rapid heart rate, complete blindness, increased hearing, and intensification of third plateau effects.

Terry Holdbrooks is a former guard at the Guantanamo Bay detention camps. He was stationed at GTMO in 2003 and 2004. During his time there, he converted to Islam. He is now a vocal critic of the camp.

Alan Wolfson creates handmade miniature sculptures of urban environments. Complete with complex interior views and lighting effects, a major work can take several months to complete.

The pieces are usually not exact representations of existing locations, but rather a combination of details from many different locations along with much of the detail from the artist’s imagination.

There is a narrative element to the work. Scenarios are played out through the use of inanimate objects in the scene. There are never people present, only things they have left behind; garbage, graffiti, or a tip on a diner table, all give the work a sense of motion and a storyline.

Gen Antoshkin said he thought the Japanese were simply unable to cope on their own. “It is clear that they do not have enough strength or means. They need to ask the international community for help,” he said. “I think the Japanese catastrophe is already more serious than Chernobyl. The main thing is that they do not allow it to become three, four or five times more serious.”

Gen Antoshkin, 68, was in charge of Soviet pilots who flew over Chernobyl’s stricken fourth reactor, dropping lead, sand and clay from the air to try to contain radiation. In the ten days after the accident on 26 April 1986, his pilots flew 4,000 such flights, exposing themselves to huge radiation doses.

✰ Hi-res photographic proof reactor core exploded at unit 3

Even to a layperson, it is obvious that this means that the huge hydrogen explosion at unit 3 must have occurred in the reactor itself, and that the entire top of the reactor containment vessel was obliterated, ejecting the contents of the core – as well as the spent fuel pool- into the atmosphere. This means, obviously, that significant quantities of plutonium were released, and that the release of radiation from unit 3 alone must be many times higher than has been admitted for the entire complex – Chernobyl pales in comparison.

The debate about coffee’s merits has raged ever since. Is it a pernicious brew that causes impotence, arterio-sclerosis, heart failure, indigestion, insomnia, premature old age, pancreatic cancer, birth defects and bad breath, as well as poverty among the farmers who grow it? Or is it an inky nectar that helps prevent Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, liver cancer, gallstones, type 2 diabetes and colon cancer, improves motor skills and reaction times, promotes fair trade to the impoverished south and stimulates both intellectual acuity and social interaction?

This really puts the whole DIY-maker-homebrew thing in perspective: Libya’s rebels aren’t just working with a hijacked cell phone network, but hobbling together their own weapons out of discarded military stockpiles. As this Al Jazeera report shows, they’re welding their own rocket launch platforms, affixing helicopter guns to pick-up trucks, and builidng missile firing controls out of light switches.

5. Congress hasn’t changed a single law on oil and gas drilling in the past year. A year later, the liability cap for companies that cause a major spill is still just $75 million, companies with dismal safety records can still obtain new leases, and they can still avoid compensating families when workers die on rigs. In January, the National Oil Spill Commission released 300 pages of findings and recommendations that Congress has largely ignored.

As world marks the Chernobyl anniversary, many say that the world has failed to learn the lessons on nuclear safety that the tragedy provided. RT talks to Professor Christopher Busby, Scientific secretary of the European Committee on radiation risks, for a little more insight on 21st century’s most serious nuclear crisis at Fukushima.

Al-Qaeda plotted to blow you up, using your Sega. Detainee Abu Faraj al-Libi’s leaked records show that he was slotted to fill Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s leadership role after alleged 9/11 mastermind Mohammed was imprisoned, Wired reports. “Detainee headed an operation to build remote detonators and conceal them in children’s video game cartridges,” his file reads, and more than 20 ‘radio-type detonating devices,” designed to be triggered with cell phones, were found in a raid of a safe-house al-Libi ran, the detonators built into the back of Sega Genesis game cartridges.

A trove of more than 700 classified military documents provides new and detailed accounts of the men who have done time at the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba, and offers new insight into the evidence against the 172 men still locked up there.

Highbrow animated GIFs? You know, the visual medium best known for doing stuff like this? Apparently so. That, anyway, is the mission of a New York-based photographer named Jamie Beck. Beck calls her creations “cinemagraphs” — “more than a photo, but not quite a video” — and has posted a series featuring supermodel Coco Rocha to her Tumblr.

There is a saying that when one lives on the mountain, one lives off the mountain. If you live next to a mountain of garbage, then what do you live off of? Several tens of farmers in Nanjing have for many years gathered near the Shuige Garbage Landfill, and collected garbage from the landfill to feed their pigs, every year sending over ten thousand adult pigs to the slaughterhouse; At the same time, next to the Jiaoze Garbage Landfill, there is also someone who is “living off the mountain when one lives on the mountain”.

Uesugi also notes that at TEPCO press conferences, which are now being held at company headquarters, foreign correspondents and Japanese freelancers regularly ask probing questions while mainstream journalists simply record and report company statements reiterating that the situation is basically under control and there is nothing to worry about. One reason for this, Uesugi suggests, is that TEPCO, a giant media sponsor, has an annual 20 billion yen advertising budget. “The media keeps defending the information from TEPCO!” “The Japanese media today is no different from the wartime propaganda media that kept repeating to the very end that ‘Japan is winning the war against America,'” Uesugi exclaimed.

Scotch tape lets you see through frosted glass

A holy war erupted yesterday at a Sikh temple in Queens — where worshippers wielding swords and cricket bats interrupted a prayer session to attack their rivals in a vicious power struggle, police and witnesses said.

Rival factions at the Baba Makhan Shah Lobana Sikh Center in South Richmond Hill have been bickering for months over control, authorities and members said.

The dispute reached a bloody climax yesterday when the infighting turned violent, accompanied by screams, taunts and death threats.

The alleged attackers — armed with at least one sword about 40 inches long, and another sword, according to a witness — were part of the old guard that had been recently voted out of power but refused to accept the decision, even going to court to challenge the election. Thanks Smart Crew

Files released by the whistleblowing website Wikileaks have revealed that the US believed many of those held at Guantanamo Bay were innocent or only low-level operatives.

I’m delighted to cross-post below an interview with Khaled Ben Mustapha, one of seven French citizens held at Guantánamo, who was released in March 2005, and who recently spoke to Arnaud Mafille, an intern for Cageprisoners. This is a fascinating interview for a number of reasons; primarily, because of Ben Mustapha’s reflections on his time in Afghanistan, on how he and others were sold to US forces, and on Guantánamo as part of a war on Islam, and also for his explanations of how he and the other French ex-prisoners have been treated in France.

A massive leak of more than 700 military documents, attributed to infamous transparency group WikiLeaks, was released Sunday night. Much of the new information deals with detainees held in Guantanamo Bay, records that begin immediately after the September 11 terrorist attacks and range to 2009, including documents relating to 172 prisoners still held at the controversial detention facility.

Here are seven shocking revelations about Guantanamo Bay and the practices there.

…Or is it mold?!

On April 19, Democracy Now ran a brief clip in which British author Muttitt called to mind Blair’s assurances to a TV audience on Feb. 6, 2003, six weeks before the war: “The idea that we’re interested in Iraq’s oil is absurd, it’s one of the most absurd conspiracy theories you can imagine.”

The London Mail Online summed up the contradictions on April 20 with classic English understatement. It noted that the flurry of meetings between oil executives and the Labour government in late 2002 “appear to be at odds with their insistence Iraq’s vast oil reserves were not a consideration ahead of the March 2003 invasion.”

Washington Post reporters obtained exclusive government documents and traveled to the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay to provide an unprecedented look at a base and prison complex that served as a central component in the Bush administration’s war on terror. It remains a key repository of detainees picked up in anti-terrorist operations. Founded in 1903, Guantanamo Bay is the oldest American military installation overseas, traditionally serving as a refueling port and a base of operations for drug interdiction and refugee missions. It covers 45 square miles of land and water along the southeastern tip of Cuba.

In Hong Kong, because of the space, apartments are small and expensive. Gary Chang, an architect, decided to design a 344 sq. ft. apartment to be able to change into 24 different designs, all by just sliding panels and walls. He calls this the “Domestic Transformer.”

Is that a chick?

Revok, one of Los Angeles’ best known graffiti writers, was arrested as he prepared to board a plane to Ireland at Los Angeles International Airport, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department reported.

Jason Williams, a.k.a. Revok, was taken into custody Thursday for an outstanding arrest warrant for failing to pay restitution, according to sheriff’s Capt. Mike Parker.

Authorities claim Revok is a member of the graffiti crew Mad Society Kings, or MSK. Officials from the sheriff’s department were notified that there was an outstanding warrant against Revok for failure to repay victims of previous vandalism incidents.

That led to his arrest, officials said.

Revok is being held in the Los Angeles County Jail in lieu of $320,000 bail.

Thanks Baller

“So what will the Second Coming look like?” Amanpour wondered.

“Well, the bible says that every eye is going to see it. And, you know, I thought how is that going to happen? There’s so many phones today. And just look at what’s happening in Libya or Egypt and everybody has got their phone up, and everybody is taking recordings and posting it on YouTube and whatever and sending it to you or — and they get shown around the world. I don’t know but he said they’ll be coming on the clouds and the world is going to moan. They’re going to groan,” Graham explained.

“I don’t mean to be disrespectful but could there be a second coming by social media? Is that what you mean?” the ABC host asked.

A former Longmont-area firefighter has pleaded guilty to forcing his 11-year-old stepdaughter to watch him urinate in an adult diaper before changing him. His stepdaughter was also allegedly forced to wear an adult diaper as punishment on two occasions.

Thanks Ramon.

Eco-Activist Killed, Composted His Girlfriend

Researchers at the University of Technology Sydney have created a new material that is lighter, less dense, harder, and stronger than steel. But this material isn’t one of those breakthroughs that only sounds good on paper. It is paper, and it could be a game-changer for materials science if it can live up to researchers’ hopes.

This graphene paper is constructed of graphite reformed by chemical processes into monolayer hexagonal carbon lattices stacked as thin as a sheet of paper, and it is remarkably strong.

The brainchild of a now defunct government research organization, the apple-cheeked animated Little Mr. Pluto debuted in the mid-1990s wearing a green helmet with a pair of antennae and the chemical symbol for plutonium, Pu. Promising to “never be scary or dangerous,” Little Pluto extolled the benefits of plutonium, which Japanese nuclear authorities have viewed as a fuel of the future for fast breeder reactor technology.

A refreshingly simple new idea has emerged in the complicated world of high energy physics. It proposes that the early universe was a one-dimensional line. Not an exploding sphere, not a chaotic ball of fire. Just a simple line of pure energy.

Over time, as that line grew, it crisscrossed and intersected itself more and more, gradually forming a tightly interwoven fabric, which, at large distances, appeared as a 2-D plane. More time passed and the 2-D universe expanded and twisted about, eventually creating a web — the 3-D universe we see today.

This concept, called “vanishing dimensions” to describe what happens the farther one looks back in time, has been gaining traction within the high energy physics community in recent months.

“It’s still up in the air when this phenomenon began to happen (1981 is as good a guess as any), but Apple II pirates, not content to merely get commercial software copied and the protection removed, started giving themselves group names (“Midwest Pirates’ Guild”, “Black Bag”, “High Society”) and began to release these pirated programs as products in themselves.

Initially, the goal was to take a program and quickly knock it down to an easily downloadable file. When this was done, the accompanying documentation might tell you who took the time to unprotect/crack the original, or a name of the cracker might be in the beginning of the program. But then it started to spiral upwards.

Within a short time, these groups started using the “splash screens” of these programs to announce their favorite bulletin boards, to take credit for unprotecting the software, or in some cases to thumb their nose at either the software publisher or other pirates. If a group was feeling particularly energetic or ambitious, they might actually create a self-sufficient animated or fast-loading splash screen just for the pirates involved. As time went on, these screens became more and more elaborate, eventually taking on an almost crowded feel as they would shoehorn in the names of the group, the cracker who cracked the game, the friends who the pirates knew (also known as “greets”) and an advertisement for the board or boards the pirates hung out on.”

With the help of his wife, Gibbins acquired his first silicone doll, Beverly, in 2007, for around $4,000. But that was only the beginning, as the couple continued to buy different kinds of love dolls, from cheap blow-up dolls costing $639 at most, to realistic silicone dolls like Jessica, who put a serious $11,202 dent in the family budget. All in all, Bob and Lizzie Gibbins estimate they’ve spent around $160,000 since they started collecting love dolls.

San Francisco police and fire personnel responded to the area near Sixth and Mission streets April 13 just after 6:20 p.m. for a separate call when the man ran out of the Golden Gate Adult Superstore.

The man suffered life-threatening burns in the incident.

In the early 1990s, Japan’s Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation (PNC) — a nuclear energy research organization which is now part of the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) — created a pro-nuclear PR cartoon entitled “Pluto-kun, Our Reliable Friend.” The aim of the animated film, which features the company mascot Pluto-kun, is to dispel some of the fears surrounding plutonium.

I had my first orgasm at the age of 17. I was sitting at my desk at school when all of a sudden, I felt a warm, pulsing feeling in my genital area. My vagina flared up and I couldn’t think straight. It was like someone had squeegeed my thoughts away. I was like, whoa, what’s that? It felt really erotic and good, but I was also freaked out, scared, and confused. After that, it started happening a few times a day. I searched online for spontaneous orgasms, but all I found was weird porn.

It kept getting worse. During my second semester of senior year, I counted orgasms on a sheet of paper. I was having 100 and 200 a day. I ran to hide in the bathroom between classes to relieve the pressure.

Exactly what it is remains murky, but Suze’s symptoms, like that of other sufferers, involves a feeling of “fullness” — a constant engorgement — of the genitals that is unprompted by erotic thoughts or feelings.

“I could be in the middle of a tennis game [or] playing canasta,” Suze says, “and then suddenly have this intense urge for intimacy. I could masturbate five times or 105 times and it would only make it worse.”

The 48DDD blonde suffers from a rare medical condition called persistent genital arousal disorder, where orgasms are triggered without direct sexual arousal.

But rather than wallow in self-pity, Gabi decided to profit from her affliction by setting up a fetish website where punters PAY to watch her scoff herself to orgasm.

After years of failure tracking down the girl who “has brown hair that shimmers in the sun”, Tomasz is now looking for a priest who will agree to marry him with the painted version of the girl of his dreams. “I don’t know what the laws on this sort of thing are in Poland. But if I can’t do it here I’ll go somewhere else and do it,” he says, and 10 years of searching tell me he means it. If he actually goes through with this unusual wedding, I’m pretty sure he’ll be the first man in the world to marry a painting.

His fame had gotten so broad — and so weird — that a few months ago, at his grandmother’s funeral, a friend of the family whispered to another person, “Can you hear me now?” just as her body was being lowered into her grave.

At his cousin’s wedding, more people rushed up to him and asked to pose for pictures than with the bride, leaving him feeling “like a cafone” (Italian for “oaf”), he told the magazine.

He also couldn’t find peace at his home in Connecticut. About five years ago, local youths began driving past his house and shouting, “Can you hear me now?” at all hours of the night.

Real Madrid waited 18 years to win back the Copa del Rey trophy, only to drop the cup and watch it get crushed under the wheels of a bus during celebrations early Thursday morning.

A rumor is floating around the physics community that the world’s largest atom smasher may have detected a long-sought subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, also known as the “God particle.”

The controversial rumor is based on what appears to be a leaked internal note from physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 17-mile-long particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland. It’s not entirely clear at this point if the memo is authentic, or what the data it refers to might mean — but the note already has researchers talking.

From the show “Toffee VeHa-Gorillah” – WARNING!!! Explicit and offensive

President Barack Obama is actually siding with police who want to use GPS devices to track you without a warrant. It always disturbed me when on “Star Trek” the captain asked the ship’s computer where a crew member was and was told the person’s exact location. Even the ship’s physician and empathy counselor were not immune from these inquiries, the answers to which could after all sometimes have been embarrassing. Is America heading toward being one big star ship, where government officials can casually inquire at will into our whereabouts and private doings?

Alex Jones talks about modern art Thanks Nico

The New York state prison system recently changed its regulations to allow inmates in same-sex marriages or civil unions conjugal visits from their partners, as well as a tweak that will allow inmates to visit their partners if they are terminally ill.

On the heels of last week’s unprecedented, massive coalition in the state in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage in New York, the Empire State is showing its progressive attitude toward more tolerant laws for same-sex couples.

Though still in its infancy, personal 3D printing technology already shows the same disruptive potential as the original printing press. Just as moveable type spread across Europe and democratized knowledge, the proliferation of 3D printers eventually promises to democratize creation. Broken dishwasher part? Download the relevant CAD file and print it out in plastic. While Amazon made trips to the store seem dated, 3D printing will make ordering (some) things online feel positively quaint.

Leave it to an iPhone app developer to turn a tool that cost hundreds of dollars a year ago into something that can be done with a 99-cent app. Grant Schindler, research scientist in Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, created Trimensional, the first app that allows users with an iPhone 4, iPad 2 or recent iPod Touch to take 3-D scans of faces or other objects and share them by e-mail. Now in the latest update, users can also e-mail animated videos of their 3-D models. For a few dollars more, artists and designers can even export their creation to CAD programs or 3-D applications, such as Maya.